Tuesday, December 18, 2018

The first offering will be a mobile 5G hotspot device from Netgear priced at $499. The service is priced at $70 per month for 15 GB of data. Expected data speeds were not disclosed.

“This is the first taste of the mobile 5G era,” said Andre Fuetsch, president, AT&T Labs and chief technology officer. “Being first, you can expect us to evolve very quickly. It’s early on the 5G journey and we’re ready to learn fast and continually iterate in the months ahead.”

Expansion plans in the first half of 2019 call for activation of mobile 5G in parts of these 7 additional cities: Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Nashville, Orlando, San Diego, San Francisco and San Jose, Calif.

AT&T has previously announced plans to offer a 5G smartphone from Samsung in the first half of 2019. A second Samsung 5G smartphone able to access both 5G mmWave and sub-6 GHz is expected in the second half of 2019.

AT&T will expand its rollout of 5G to three additional cities this year – Charlotte, Raleigh, and Oklahoma City – bringing its total number of cities with 5G launches in 2018 to 12. The other previously announced cities are Atlanta, Dallas, and Waco.

AT&T also noted that its 5G Evolution technology is now live in more than 140 markets, and will reach at least 400+ markets this year. 5G Evolution enables peak theoretical wireless speeds of at least 400 Mbps on capable devices.

Also, AT&T has just launched LTE-LAA in parts of 8 new markets – Austin, Dallas, Houston, Little Rock, San Antonio, San Jose, Tampa, and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, bringing the total number of LTE-LAA markets to 15. LTE-LAA offers peak theoretical wireless speeds reaching up to 1 Gbps on capable devices.

Cisco agreed to acquire privately-held Luxtera, a developer of silicon photonic technologies, for $660 million in cash and assumed equity awards.

Luxtera, which is based in Carlsbad, California, focuses on silicon photonics process and packaging technologies for building integrated optics capabilities for webscale and enterprise data centers, service provider market segments, and other customers.

Luxtera leverages a hybrid integration approach wherein the photonics die forms the base of the transceiver chipset, while the light source and electronics die are attached on top. The company says its ability to integrate all optical components into a single silicon chip enables it to manufacture at wafer scale.

Cisco said the integration of Luxtera will broaden its portfolio of 100GbE and 400GbE optics. Cisco plans to incorporate Luxtera's technology across its intent-based networking portfolio, spanning enterprise, data center and service provider markets.

"With Cisco's 2018 Visual Networking Index projecting that global Internet traffic will increase threefold over the next five years, our customers are facing an exponential demand for Internet bandwidth," said David Goeckeler, executive vice president and general manager, Networking and Security Business at Cisco. "Optics is a fundamental technology to enable this future. Coupled with our silicon and optics innovation, Luxtera will allow our customers to build the biggest, fastest and most efficient networks in the world."

T-Mobile US and Sprint received key regulatory approvals for their proposed merger transaction from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), as well as from the U.S. Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of Defense, collectively referred to as Team Telecom.

Team Telecom confirmed it has no objections to the merger and has withdrawn its request to defer action on the transaction.

“We are pleased to achieve both of these important milestones in the journey to build the New T-Mobile. We are a step closer to offering customers a supercharged disruptor that will create jobs from day one and deliver a real alternative to fixed broadband while delivering the first broad and deep nationwide 5G network for the United States,” said John Legere, Chief Executive Officer of T-Mobile. “ These approvals assure the strong partnership both companies have with the U.S. government will continue with the New T-Mobile. We look forward to continuing our discussions with the remaining regulatory agencies reviewing our transaction to share our story and subsequently achieve similar positive results.”

The companies expect the deal to be completed during the first half of 2019.

Packet, a start-up developing a bare metal cloud for developers, will leverage Netronome's SmartNICs to power cloud-native workloads at the edge.

The companies are working on a joint design to be deployed throughout all of Packet’s cloud and edge sites. Each of Packet’s new Edge cloud microservers with integrated Netronome SmartNIC technology delivers up to 25 Gbps throughput while enabling highly scalable security policies and control close to the cloud-native applications. As

Cloud-native and edge workloads demand stringent cost, power and latency parameters without compromising security and the pace of innovation.

“With this platform we are bringing the lessons of hyperscale providers directly to the edge with a disaggregated, accelerator-based architecture and a custom designed hardware model,” said Zachary Smith, CEO of Packet. “We see cloud-native network workload driving huge demand at the infrastructure edge and the combination of SmartNIC technology and eBPF expertise from Netronome brings not only significant cost savings but also unique performance capabilities to our content, IoT and Telco customers.”

“New edge-based technologies and applications such as autonomous vehicles, AI, and augmented reality are heavily latency dependent and require the strongest of security without sacrificing performance,” said Niel Viljoen, CEO and founder of Netronome. “Packet’s new Netronome SmartNIC-accelerated, low-latency Edge cloud infrastructure with eBPF offload will enable developers to effectively utilize the massive amounts of collectable data on the edge to build and test highly secure, real-time applications.”

“ADTRAN is committed to supporting service providers as they address the broadband disparity in rural America, and our focus remains on delivering the best available options on the market today—solutions that allow them to fully tackle challenging CAF II deployment requirements while minimizing expenses,” ADTRAN Portfolio Manager Javier Lopez said. “Service providers looking to offer triple play services in both underserved and urban areas will find everything they need within the most recent additions to our access portfolio.”

ADTRAN notes that the FCC recently announced updates to its CAF program to improve the quality and availability of high-speed internet service in rural America. Further, the U.S. Department of Agriculture also unveiled a $600 million loan and grant program to assist with building rural broadband infrastructure.

The CBRS Alliance and the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) agreed to collaborate to advance use of the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum band and OnGo technology.

Collaboration will focus on the technical interworking between the CBRS Alliance and ATIS solutions, including the International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI), Home Network Identity (HNI), Priority Services, and Radio Access Networks. The work will also address legal and regulatory compliance topics.

“The CBRS Alliance values working with ATIS as one of the most respected industry associations in the telecommunications sector,” said Alan Ewing, Executive Director of the CBRS Alliance. “We’re looking forward to tackling technical challenges that may be associated with delivering commercial service in the 3.5 GHz band and to maximizing cooperation between our organizations.”

“Earlier this year, ATIS and the CBRS Alliance achieved a key milestone in enabling use of CBRS spectrum to improve mobile connectivity and make it more widely available,” said Susan Miller, President and CEO of ATIS. “This new agreement affirms that we will continue our collaboration with the CBRS Alliance, which has been effective in creating infrastructure to utilize the 3.5 GHz CBRS band for LTE services, while also advancing IoT applications.”

The CBRS Alliance, an industry organization focused on driving the development, commercialization, and adoption of "OnGo" shared spectrum solutions, now has over 100 member organizations.

The CBRS Alliance, which is now two years old, also announced the establishment of its Deployment and Operations (D&O) Working Group (WG), to be chaired by Piyush Raj, Director Technology Innovation, American Tower – the largest U.S. owner and operator of wireless communications infrastructure – and Boingo Wireless Chief Technology Officer Dr. Derek Peterson. The fifth working group of the CBRS Alliance will be focused on identifying, defining and implementing end-to-end deployment models and operational best practices for OnGo connectivity, including the interconnections between networks, network operators, and roaming hubs.

Dr. Richard Uhlig has been named as the new managing director of Intel Labs. Prior to this role, Rich was the director of Systems and Software Research in Intel Labs, where he led research efforts in virtualization, cloud-computing systems, software-defined networking, big-data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence. He joined Intel in 1996 and led the definition of multiple generations of virtualization architecture for Intel processors and platforms, known collectively as Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT). Rich earned his Ph.D. in computer science and engineering from the University of Michigan.

“The work we are doing at Intel Labs is pushing the boundaries of technology every day whether that’s our research in quantum and neuromorphic computing or how we’re extending and evolving Moore’s Law. We have some of the brightest minds working together across industry and academia to solve some of the biggest challenges in technology. I am very excited to lead Intel Labs in this data-centric era,” stated Uhlig.